It has been one year since Ithaca College added Professor Mickey Huff to its faculty. His multi-disciplinary work in critical media literacy and journalism as director of Project Censored and co-host of its radio show makes him a uniquely experienced addition to the Park School. He’s also a published author, having contributed to over twenty books, most notably The Media & Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People and the annual Project Censored’s State of the Free Press. I spoke with Professor Huff for Buzzsaw Magazine about his background, his first year at Ithaca College, and what he hopes to offer students in his time here.
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Maz Abukhalaf: You’ve been teaching media literacy and journalism for quite a while. You were at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area last before being hired at Ithaca College. What did you do there, and what made you decide to move?
Professor Huff: I was at Diablo Valley College for 25 years, so I was able to retire, basically. I was there teaching history, I developed courses on American pop culture, I co-founded the Social Justice Studies program there, I taught social science and political economy, [and] I also took over the revitalization of the journalism program and chaired the journalism program there in 2019 until I left. Recently, I was hired at the Park Center for Independent Media, … not only because of my academic background, … but I think that my work with Project Censored, the media watchdog that looks at the underreported stories from the independent media, is what clearly made me a match for the [PCIM]. … And so, I see my role at the Park Center for Independent Media as really kind of fusing media literacy, education, independent journalism, and getting it in front of students so that they realize that there are, in fact, career paths there. … I’m really grateful that we’re able to fund interns every summer, between eight and 12 interns within independent media outlets, where we pay them to do that here at the Park Center. … We help them build their CVs [and] we help them go out into the world to continue to do that work. … I’m trying to get us even more out of Park, which is why I [am teaching] the Ithaca Seminar, … I want to meet students when they’re getting here. I teach Junior [and] Senior level courses on indie media, I teach courses on [the] post-truth world and fake news and deconstructing propaganda, but those are mostly for people who are already in the program. I wanted to come to the Seminar and teach [The Media & Me: An Introduction to Critical Media Literacy] because I want the students to see that media literacy is for everyone. And this semester, we have a lot going on. We have a lecture series, we bring people here and we do the Izzy Awards, we do Banned Books Week, we’re revamping our website. … The Park Center needs to be part of the broader community around independent media, media literacy, and that’s kind of the vision that we have and what we’re trying to build here.
MA: You’ve described how your experience in journalism and media literacy education have overlapped. What do you think is missing from journalism education that is gained in studying media literacy?
PH: Andy Lee Roth, our former Associate Director, who’s now our editor-at-large, he led a team for Project Censored. We were awarded the Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellowship last year to develop an Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists program. Andy spearheaded it with some people on our team, and it’s ALFJ.org. … It trains journalists to understand how to interact with search engines, the internet, shadow-banning, [and] bots. What we’ve discovered is that, yes, journalists can be well-trained to do certain things. One of them is supposed to be critical thinking. But we also have discovered that journalists don’t necessarily have courses in critical media literacy or media literacy backgrounds, which now technologically includes artificial intelligence literacy, algorithmic literacy, and so those are things we’ve been focusing our attention on.
MA: On the first day of your Ithaca Seminar class, you warned your students that we won’t always agree with what you say. Did you use the same warning with your classes 15 or 20 years ago, or is there something specific about this time which necessitates such a disclaimer?
PH: I’ve always been sort of in the realm of history, politics, culture, cultural criticism, [and] media studies. … That sort of ball of things is just swirling with controversy, right? Lots of things happen in the world, and people have varying degrees of it. And while I do specifically say some of these things out loud, part of the joke that I often have with my students is I don’t give trigger warnings. I’m just a walking trigger warning. If you see me coming, there’s a likelihood I’m going to either say something, do something, ask something, or address a topic that is probably somewhat controversial or [one that I] have a different take or perspective on, because I like to learn from other people and hear different perspectives. … I think it’s important for students to know that it’s okay to have conflict. It’s okay to disagree. One of the textbooks that I wrote, Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management and Critical Media Literacy is a handbook of how to do that right. It involves several things, first and foremost, and of course, involves communication and active listening, constructive dialogue versus destructive dialogue. So when I’m going in and talking to people with that kind of announcement, I’m suggesting that rather than going through life thinking that we can avoid disagreements and conflicts, we need to come to the realization and embrace the reality that it’s inevitable, and in fact, it’s inevitable [that] the more open we are to different things and different ideas, the more we’ll run into them. … Look for facts, look for transparent sources, and then think about, well, where am I on this issue? … We just want to encourage people to be themselves, to think critically, examine their biases, … learn how to construct logical arguments with absent fallacious reasoning, and specifically tether that to a better, broader understanding of media and constructive ways to communicate those differences, not destructive ways to attack or tear things down.
MA: When did you write Let’s Agree to Disagree, and what was happening in the world that may have prompted it?
PH: My colleague Nolan Higdon is a former student of mine. We’ve written three books together, … we teach together, … lots of different things. … This book was a successor to a book we did for City Lights Books out of San Francisco … called United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America and What We Can Do About It. That book came out in 2019, so that’s during the first Trump administration. … So interestingly, our book wasn’t really about Trump. It was about a series of circumstances that took place over time that created this reality-TV-star President that people liked enough even though he lost by 3 million votes, there was enough to get him in the electoral college. And I think many people, especially the corporate media, were ill equipped to deal with someone like Donald Trump, who is a real estate mogul. … And so what we were trying to do was untangle this mess in the media such that people wouldn’t just scapegoat it all on Trump or all of the GOP, but they would look historically at the conditions that created a media system and sort of this dark money politics system whereby the people’s votes don’t really matter at all at the presidential level. … So in other words, it’s setting up kind of a show business political culture in a lot of ways, and that’s what the book looks at and it tries to deconstruct it, but it carefully does so in ways that, yes, it looks at Trump, … but we warned people in the book, this is going to continue if we don’t address the root causes of it, right?
MA: What can college students, and specifically IC students, do to increase their media literacy, exercise their free speech, and practice better journalism?
PH: Get involved. Take courses in the program. Come visit the Park Center for Independent Media. Ask about the work we do at the Park Center and Project Censored. Our books that we do every year, The State of the Free Press, they’re student research. … Come over here. Come talk to me. Come talk to Marcy [Sutherland]. Come talk to Professor Todd Schack, who is also our Associate Director at the Park Center and teaches courses around ethics in media and history in media and issues in media around independent news. See how you can get involved. Again, not just internships, but as I mentioned, we have students that research stories from colleges all across the country that end up in our annual books at Project Censored. We are now having students do more work running our social media campaign at the Park Center. We’re having student writers and contributors writing about things that matter to them, right? Sounds kind of link what you’re doing at Buzzsaw [Magazine], right? An extraordinary experience for you as a younger person coming to college to get the opportunity to write about things that you’re interested in with your voice and your generational perspective, that we—I’m a Gen X person—we need each other, right? And so that’s the spirit in which that I’m here at Park, and that’s why I welcome students from any background who have an interest in this kind of thing, because once again, … critical media literacy is for everyone, every discipline. Everybody should understand the importance of media literacy, because we rely on media to learn about the world around us and communicate with each other.
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You can learn more about Professor Huff’s work through (Project Censored)[ https://www.projectcensored.org], and its radio show (The Project Censored Show)[ https://www.projectcensored.org/the-project-censored-show/], which is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. His office is located at Park 257, and his email is mhuff2@ithaca.edu.
Byline: Maz Abukhalaf is a first-year in the Park Pathways program who believes that getting involved on campus is the pathway to higher media literacy for IC students. He can be reached at mabukhalaf@ithaca.edu.